A century after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, women have become
nearly half of the unionized labor force. They work in the growing
service and public employment sectors as nurses, home attendants,
teachers, and clerks. Previously labeled women's issues—maternity
leave, equal pay, sexual harassment, and work-family balance—have
become union issues. Women hold leadership positions in the AFL-CIO
and Change to Win. With the disappearance of manufacturing and the
growth of service labor, women of color—both immigrant- and
U.S.-born—have become the driving force in the labor movement for
safe jobs, living wages, and dignity at work, leading
women-dominated unions and worker associations. It is not an
overstatement to say that the future of the labor movement appears
up to the women.

It hasn't always been this way. For at least a century, labor
feminists have fought for the interests of wage-earning women and
working-class housewives, both within the feminist and the labor
movements. Still, the priorities of the women's movement for
sex-based rights and those of the labor movement for class
solidarity often diverged during the twentieth century.
Working-class feminists struggled against middle-class feminists
who focused primarily on achieving equality with male professionals
and executives. They also battled men who sought to exclude women
from unionized jobs and who denied organized women workers a full
share of power in the labor movement.

Highlighting key moments when feminists and unionists came
together over the last century, this essay offers a usable past
drawn from the fraught—but often productive—relationship between
feminism and labor. An examination of the contact between organized
women's groups and organized labor, women's organizations within
the labor movement, and feminist labor organizing shows that when
feminists and unions worked together, both benefited. Labor gained
when it understood women's issues as crucial for the advancement of
the working class. The women's movement was at its strongest when
its membership and agenda crossed class lines. Recognition of this
history may help to revitalize feminism as much as organized
labor.

Labor Feminism Before the 1960s: The Women's Trade Union
League

The years surrounding 1911's Triangle Shirtwaist Fire saw
significant and broad-based collaboration between labor activists
and middle- to upper-class feminists in the United States. That
period began with the creation of the Women's Trade Union League
(WTUL) in 1903. The League, as it was known by its members, drew
together educated women reformers (mostly white, Protestant, and
native-born) and young women workers (many of them immigrant Jews,
Italians, and Irish) to improve factory wages, working conditions,
and hours. The WTUL embodied both an unusual degree of
collaboration between feminists and the labor movement, and the
many tensions that arose from longstanding attempts to build
lasting and productive relationships.

This cross-class women's network deepened with the uprisings of
young women garment workers that began in New York in 1909 and then
spread over the next few years into other Eastern and Midwestern
cities. Middle-class and affluent supporters of woman
suffrage—including League activists, college students, and even
wealthy socialites—saw these strikes as an opportunity to win
working women to the cause. Forming what the press dubbed "mink
brigades," affluent supporters marched alongside young immigrant
women on picket lines in a largely successful attempt to reduce
high rates of police brutality. After they bailed arrested strikers
out of jail, they spoke (alongside the released strikers) for woman
suffrage on the steps of jails and courthouses. Affluent feminists
brought working women into existing suffrage organizations, as well
as offering financial support for the establishment of
working-class suffrage groups. Working women understood, as Polish
Jewish cap maker Rose Schneiderman explained in 1907, that they
"must … secure political power to shape their own labor
conditions."

Women factory and manufacturing workers knew they needed the
political and financial support of these more affluent "allies."
Nonetheless, imbalances in social power and financial resources
generated much conflict in the first two decades of the century,
when working-class members felt bullied, condescended to, or
generally misunderstood. While many working-class women embraced
socialism and anarchism, their better-off...

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